Daayiee Abdullah

Daayiee Abdullah (1954-), born Sidney Thompson, was a gay Muslim imam in Washington DC, United States.

Biography
Sidney Thompson was born in 1954 in Detroit, Michigan to a Baptist family, but he converted to Islam while studying in China, by which point he had already come out as gay. In 1995, he graduated from the David A. Clarke School of Law, but he was kicked out of the Graduate School of Islamic Social Sciences in Ashburn, Virginia in 2003 when they discovered that he was gay, against sharia law. He planned to build the Masjid An-Nur al-Isslah to be a tolerant mosque, accepting LGBT Muslims, and he eventually succeeded in its establishment. He also became a leader of gay rights in Norway.